How to keep hate alive

President Barack Obama's opposition should thank him. His election has boosted the audiences for right-wing talk shows, especially those that appeal to the easily frightened.

It also appears to have liberated conservatives from liberal political correctness, if only to construct an equally delusional conservative version: Some of the conservative movement's leading lights no longer want to take racism seriously, unless it is "reverse racism" against white people.

You could see and hear this impulse among elite conservative voices as the House vote for Obama's health care overhaul neared and rage by protesters against it boiled over in the streets and hallways on Capitol Hill. One black Democrat, Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, was spat upon. Capitol Hill police detained a man but released him after Cleaver declined to press charges. Racial slurs were shouted at two other black congressmen, including Georgia Democrat John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, an openly gay Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted with an infamous slur against homosexuals.

Yet National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger advanced a peculiar thesis about race on the magazine's Web site, which he quoted from a letter sent by a reader. The ugly episodes on Capitol Hill are evidence that "racism in America is dead," the letter averred, because of all the attention they have received. After the abominations of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, the letter writer observed, all this fuss over the "occasional public utterance of a bad word" is evidence that "real racism has been reduced to de minimis levels," Latin for no big deal.

Yet, the writer noted, "charges of racism seem to increase." Therefore, he continued, "I'll vote for the first politician with the brass to say that ‘racism' should be dropped from our national dialogue."

That makes one of us.

I'd feel more enthusiastic about the rush by Nordlinger and his friends to delete the R-word from our national dialogue if willful ignorance of a problem could cure it. Unfortunately, even in the days of Jim Crow, there were segregationists who tried to chill race talk as no big deal, just "meddling" by "outside agitators" and "briefcase-totin' liberals" against "states' rights."

Yet the Nordlinger thesis has received attaboys from allies like talk-show host and former Education Secretary William Bennett, who, I believe, knows better but loves to argue. "Is there occasional racism? Of course," he said on the air Monday. "But this country's been transformed on the issue of race." For example, he said, "You talk to young people (and) they don't even understand how people could have judged people by race."

That message apparently was lost on the 16-year-old prankster who recently made news — and got himself charged with harassment and bias intimidation — by announcing over an unguarded public address system in a New Jersey Wal-Mart: "All black people, leave the store now." Ah, kids today.

Unfortunately, the logic of racial denial turns on itself. If the shouting of racial epithets proves that racism is dead, the shouting of "socialist" by Obamaphobes must mean socialism is extinct.

He raged during his Monday show against Obama's health care overhaul and planned immigration reforms, according to a transcript on his Web site, with, "He has come to divide. He has come to conquer. Is there anybody who now doubts what I meant when I said, ‘I hope he fails'?"

Well, yes.

For starters, if Obama was so determined to divide Americans by race, he never would have gotten elected. But, of course, the luxury of talk-show demagoguery is the freedom it affords one to ignore the facts.

I'm not surprised to see Limbaugh leave out details that get in the way of the narrative he is trying to invent. That's show biz.

I am only dismayed that his fans don't seem to notice when they're being insulted. Or maybe they just don't want to notice.

I am not unhappy to see political correctness knocked down a few pegs. PC is unhealthy when it stifles honest, candid discussion. But free speech helps America's many diverse groups learn more about each other.

Without it, it's easy to keep hate alive.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage.